30. Create Personalized City Tours

Tours are a great way to explore cities. Whether by bike share or by segway, you can rapidly take in highlights you wouldn’t have otherwise been about to view. South Bend has offered some fantastic architectural tours over the years, both walking and by bus. Years ago, I talked with Visit South Bend about highlighting a broad range of aspects within the community, from sustainability to architecture to gardens. Logistically though, unless you have a high demand or a critical mass of people, it’s very inefficient to coordinate tours around tour guides’ schedules to give tours, especially if your aim is to highlight components of cities otherwise unknown.

So the question is, how do you call attention the aspects of cities that appeal to subsets of the population? There are dozens of apps for how to explore cities. But creating our own, customizable apps can help sell the aspects of South Bend that without an intimate knowledge of the city, you might miss. These types of applications are reasonable to develop and can help sell a city to new people, who want to explore on their own time and via their own, unique interests.

Partnering with groups like Hack Michiana and enFocus would be logical next steps to developing something that both current and potential residents could use.